PODCAST · business
Business 300
by Business 300
Hello and welcome to Business 300.With weekly 5-minute episodes, Business 300 is a show to equip and encourage entrepreneurs and business managers. Owning and managing a business is good work. But it is hard work. It can feel like you’re drowning with no time to get help. Perhaps these bite-size nuggets can be of assistance.
Episodes
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Ep. 300 - Business Is Really Good
This will be my final 5 minutes. One last round of 300 seconds about business. Let me make the case one final time. Business is really good.
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Ep. 299 - Letter To A Future Business Owner
The next 5 minutes is my letter to a future business owner.
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Ep. 298 - The Business You Leave Behind
Building something that outlasts us is a design choice we make while we're still in the middle of it. The difference between owning a job and owning a business is that the job dies with the one doing it. A business survives the founder.
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Ep. 297 - You Have An Expiration Date
Your time running this business is shorter than you think. It always is. That's not a reason to panic. It's a reason to stop deferring and start building with the kind of clarity that only comes from knowing the clock is real.
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Ep. 296 - When In Doubt, Think You're Right
Nerve is something we like here at Business 300. Nerve is what enables a business owner to decide and act. But knowing you need nerve and knowing what to do with it in the moment of doubt are different things. This is about that moment. You've done the work, examined what you can, named your...
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Ep. 295 - Negotiation Isn't Manipulation
Negotiation is as much a part of business ownership as anything else. We're all a part of it. But sometimes we misidentify what negotiation is.
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Ep. 294 - Don't Let Competition Define You
You should know who else is serving your customer and what they're bringing to the table. You should pay attention to your competitors. Awareness of the competitive landscape is basic business literacy. But there's a line between awareness and orientation. Awareness means you understand your...
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Ep. 293 - What Are Your Assumptions?
Assumptions are the part of the plan most likely to be wrong. The plan itself is usually logical. If X is true, then Y follows. The owner has thought through the steps. What he hasn't thought through is whether X is actually true. He's built a sound structure on ground he hasn't tested.
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Ep. 292 - Cash Before Growth
Growth and cash are inversely related — when one goes up, the other comes down. That's the nature of the trade-off. But knowing the trade-off exists and actually preparing for it are two very different disciplines. The mistake isn't pursuing growth. The mistake is pursuing growth without…
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Ep. 291 - Saying Yes Once Is Saying No 100 Times
Strategy, at its core, is the act of making a small number of defining choices that render a large number of subsequent choices unnecessary. One clear commitment at the top eliminates hundreds of ambiguous decisions further down.
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Ep. 290 - You Are The SOP
Standard operating procedures exist to do something simple: ensure that the work gets done the same way, at the same standard, every time. Writing them is the easy part. But every SOP is being constantly evaluated for relevance by the people who execute it, and the primary evidence they're…
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Ep. 289 - Decisions Over Effort
Effort is not the same thing as progress. Outcomes are shaped more by decisions than by effort. Even though you can see someone working late, you can't see the chain of choices that determined whether that late night was productive or pointless. Effort is visible. Decisions, not so much.
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Ep. 288 - Work to Make Things Simple
There's a temptation in business to equate complexity with sophistication. The more layers a system has, the more thorough it must be. The more steps in the process, the more professional it looks. The bigger the spreadsheet, the more serious the operation. But complexity isn't a sign of…
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Ep. 287 - You're the Ceiling to Your Business
A business grows in proportion to the capacity of the person running it. Your business will not outgrow you. It can't. You're the constraint it organizes itself around. If the business has stalled, the first place to look isn't the market or the team. It's your own development.
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Ep. 286 - You Need a What and a How
A strategy is not a vision or an aspiration. A strategy is not a list of goals pinned to a whiteboard. A strategy is a plan - a concrete description of what you intend to accomplish and how you intend to accomplish it.
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Ep. 285 - Maintenance Is Part of Doing Business
Maintenance isn't a separate activity from doing business. It is part of doing business. The work of upkeep is as real and essential as the work of production.
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Ep. 284 - Revenue, Profit, & Cash
If you ask a business owner how his company is doing, he'll almost always give you the same answer: revenue. The number rolls off the tongue because it's the one he knows best, the one he tracks most closely, the one that feels like the scoreboard. But revenue is the most misleading number in...
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Ep. 283 - Have the Nerve to Confront Conflict
Every organization has an emotional climate. Everyone who works there feels it. It's the unspoken rules about what gets said, what gets ignored, and what everyone pretends not to notice. That climate is set by what the leader is willing or not willing to confront.
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Ep. 282 - Great Employees Don't Need Motivation
There are employees who are motivated, and those who aren't - employees who care, and those who don't. Usually, business owners leave the motivated employees alone since they're not a problem. And they spend a lot of their time and energy on the unmotivated ones, trying to get them to care. But…
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Ep. 281 - Work and Sleep Like a Calvinist
"God will provide" is a comfort when you're facing uncertainty. A reminder that you're not in control, that God is sovereign, and faithful. There's a common misstep when Christians use "God will provide" to justify inaction. But that's not faith. There's a big difference between faith and...
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Ep. 280 - When You Can't Raise Prices
Your costs are up. Supplies cost more. Labor costs more. Everything costs more. Your margin is shrinking. The obvious answer is to raise prices. But what if your customers are price-sensitive, and your competitors haven't moved? You're worried that raising prices means losing the business…
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Ep. 279 - 'Buy Local' Is Virtue-Signaling
If the only reason to buy from you is that you're local, why should anyone buy from you at all? Unless proximity is part of the value, local doesn't really matter. "Buy local" is a marketing tactic that avoids the real question.
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Ep. 278 - Burnout is a Business Problem
Exhaustion doesn't signal some sort of character flaw as much as it signals a system flaw. Much of our exhaustion has to do with our business having broken systems, and us compensating with unsustainable effort.
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Ep. 277 - AI Won't Replace You
Maybe AI won't replace you or make your business obsolete. But someone using AI to work faster, smarter, and cheaper will. This isn't new. It's the same pattern that happens and will keep happening.
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Ep. 276 - You're Dealing With People
People are inescapable in the field of business. Even if you're on your own, your customers are people. And, it's hard to think of a business where you're not having to deal with any people in order to serve those customers. So, people in the input, people in the output. What sort of approach...
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Ep. 275 - Act, Fail, Learn, Do
There's a way to be paralyzed by the possibility of failure. There's a way to plan longer, research more, and wait for conditions to improve to the point of deadlock. It's when you treat failure as something to avoid at all costs. But failure isn't the opposite of success. It's part of the path…
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Ep. 274 - Manage Employees' Expectations
When dealing with employees, many business owners are tempted to promise everything, but deliver almost nothing. This is not out of malice, but out of insecurity. They're scared of disappointing people, so they tell them what they want to hear. But if the promises aren't real, the created...
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Ep. 273 - Be Real
There's the sort of business owner who spends more time crafting his online persona than building his actual business. He optimizes his bio, chases engagement metrics, manufactures relatability. And most of it is fake. Show without substance. Promotion without product. A brand built on air.…
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Ep. 272 - When Sales Should Say No
Saying no to a sale is hard. It feels like leaving money on the table. But saying yes to the wrong customer, for the wrong work, at the wrong price isn't winning.
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Ep. 271 - From Bean Counter to Value Guide
Some people think business finance exists to count money, track expenses, reconcile accounts, and make sure the tax filings are accurate. But if you limit your expectations for the finance function to just that, you're limiting your business. Finance isn't just about recording what happened. It's...
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Ep. 270 - Get Into The Mess
We're not in the mess because we don't know what to do. We're in the mess because we know how much work it's going to take, and would rather not have to do it. We're hoping that if we wait long enough, it'll somehow get easier or someone else will handle it. At some point, we have to stop kidding...
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Ep. 269 - Christian Excellence in Business
There's a persistent anxiety among Christian business owners that revolves around an unease about profit. There's a need to justify their work by tacking on something more "spiritual." As if business itself weren't enough. As if serving customers profitably required moral laundering to be...
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Ep. 268 - Cultivating Culture - Part 2
You've embodied the culture. Your team sees you living the values, producing results, proving it works. That's good. And, embodiment alone won't scale. At some point, you need structure in order to build culture. You need a deliberate process for cultivating culture across the organization.
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Ep. 267 - Cultivating Culture - Part 1
Every business owner and their mom talks about culture - values statements, team-building events, speeches about what the company stands for. But culture isn't built by what you say. It's built by who you are. Before you can build the business culture you want, you must embody it.
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Ep. 266 - When To Quit
Sometimes quitting isn't failure. Sometimes it's wisdom. The question is knowing the difference. So, this one's a little different. It's about knowing when to quit. When should you quit?
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Ep. 265 - Inspect the Activity, Not Just the Results
There's a comfort in tracking results. They tell you whether you won or lost. But results are history. By the time you're seeing them, the decisions that produced them are weeks or months old. You can't manage results. But you can manage what drives them.
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Ep. 264 - Competing on Price
When customers shop on price alone, most business owners assume that's the nature of their market. But commoditization isn't inevitable. It's what happens when you fail to give customers a reason to choose you beyond simply cost. Commodity-type pricing isn't a market condition you're stuck with....
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Ep. 263 - When Customers Ask for Discounts
When a prospect asks you for a discount, what do you do? Most salespeople negotiate. They justify the price, explain the value, maybe split the difference. What's actually happening is that the customer doesn't see or appreciate the value you're offering. And that's not a pricing problem. That's…
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Ep. 262 - Your Rallying Cry
Leaders cast vision, explain strategy, lay out plans. But not every leader is successful at rallying people to a better future. Yes, much of it has to do with the leader's character and presence, for sure. But his ability to communicate the vision in a way that is clear and enticing is…
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Ep. 261 - Build Backwards
Most business owners set goals forward but don't plan backward. They know where they want to end up in December, but don't know what has to be true in March to make that possible. They then miss their targets because they never figured out what would have to be true - operationally, financially,...
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Ep. 260 - Winners Crawl Into The Grave
There’s a point in your business building efforts where you’ve given everything you have and the problem is still there. The choice is obvious. Quit, or keep going. It’s not complicated. But it most definitely is difficult. And that’s where most businesses die. Not because the problem was...
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Ep. 259 - The Difference Between Visionaries & Children
Maybe you’re a guy who’s got ideas. Lots of them. You’re constantly seeing opportunities, imagining possibilities, thinking about what could be. And maybe, because you’ve got ideas, you call yourself a visionary. Maybe you’ve even convinced others to do so too. But being a visionary takes more…
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Ep. 258 - Value-First Administration
With knowing that order and control is a means to the end of customer-value, not an end in and of itself, you can build a Value-Centered Administrative System. Here’s what the looks like.
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Ep. 257 - The Administration Drift
Order and control are good. And there's a way to do it right. But not when your business suffers from the Administrative Drift.
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Ep. 256 - Delegation Isn't Abdication
Giving someone a task doesn't free you from responsibility. It changes what you're responsible for - from doing the work to ensuring the work gets done well. Delegation isn't abdication.
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Ep. 255 - You're Not Owed Anything
The year doesn’t owe you anything. But it also doesn’t prevent you from getting what you can earn. The opportunity is still there. The customers are still buying. The problems are still solvable. You just have to stop expecting it to be easy. Instead, go into this year expecting resistance and...
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Ep. 254 - Set Fewer Goals, Hit More Targets
What if you want to get more done this year than just 3 things? That's great. So do I. So then set goals on a quarterly basis, instead of an annual one. 3 priorities for the next 3 months. You finish those, you can add some more. If you don't finish them, you keep at it for the next batch of 3...
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Ep. 253 - Systems Beat Motivation, Every Time
If you feel motivated now, great. Use that motivation to build yourself a follow-through system. Motivation is a spark. Systems are the engine. Build the engine. Start boring. Finish strong. Systems beat motivation, every time.
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Ep. 252 - Leaders Create Categories
Vision without categories is a foreign language. People need frameworks to understand what you're talking about. They're imagination is limited to their current mental paradigms. Leaders create those frameworks, as they build the mental architecture that turns tasks into meaningful contribution....
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Ep. 251 - Price Is Filter - Not Barrier
Consider raising your prices. Not arbitrarily. But strategically. Identify the customer segment that values what you do and is willing to pay for it. Then price for them. Yes, you'll lose some customers. That's the point. You're filtering them out. Stop pricing defensively. Start pricing...
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ABOUT THIS SHOW
Hello and welcome to Business 300.With weekly 5-minute episodes, Business 300 is a show to equip and encourage entrepreneurs and business managers. Owning and managing a business is good work. But it is hard work. It can feel like you’re drowning with no time to get help. Perhaps these bite-size nuggets can be of assistance.
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Frequently Asked Questions
How many episodes does Business 300 have?
Business 300 currently has 299 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is Business 300 about?
Hello and welcome to Business 300.With weekly 5-minute episodes, Business 300 is a show to equip and encourage entrepreneurs and business managers. Owning and managing a business is good work. But it is hard work. It can feel like you’re drowning with no time to get help. Perhaps these bite-size...
How often does Business 300 release new episodes?
Business 300 publishes regularly with 299 episodes available. Check the episode list for the typical release schedule.
Where can I listen to Business 300?
You can listen to Business 300 on PodParley by clicking any episode. We provide an embedded audio player for direct listening, and you can also subscribe via your preferred podcast app using the RSS feed.
Who hosts Business 300?
Business 300 is created and hosted by Business 300.
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